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"In the meantime you can't say, 'Oh you're right, four years from now we'll do x because you asked us to. "The biggest reason, as you see with this, is it just takes a long time to come out the other end of the input," he says. Schiller says that Apple listens during such problems, even if it is not able to publicly say so. One thing that made the old keyboard and other issues so particularly frustrating is that Apple was largely quiet about the problem – it did not acknowledge it, initially, and even once it had it was not clear how big an issue it was, or whether a fix was coming. The company listened to complaints about the thermal throttling on the revised machines – some people found they quickly got too hot and slowed down – and has redesigned the architecture of the laptop so that it can better throw out heat while operating at its highest level. But in early use the new keyboard feels robust and reliable, and it really does have the satisfying click of the Magic Keyboard.)Īpple has responded to other concerns about the old laptops, too. (There is no way to test for certain that the new design fixes the problems, of course: the keys on the old MacBook Pro felt good too, until they didn't. Apple took the design of those keys – which have not seen any of the same complaints about reliability – and iterated them through testing, squishing them down into a laptop and improving on the feel and response. It is actually based on the well-known Magic Keyboard that ships with Macs and was released four years ago. The new keyboard also has the advantage of not being quite so innovative. "And all of those things become part of the learning you use going forward on everything." "One of the great things is when you go through these programmes you come out the other side smarter, more capable with new tools we've developed, new models that you can simulate any future product on with new testing to figure out failure modes," he says. So how can they be confident that won't happen this time around – that this is another design which, under the hands of customers, might turn out to have its own problems and its own failures? Schiller points to the rigorous testing that has happened this time around – which involved stressing the keyboard and finding its failure points, in an attempt to ensure that they could be avoided this time around. It even seemed they were right, until the angry clatter of broken keyboards became too loud to ignore and it was clear that something had gone quite wrong with the new design. But that's no guarantee that it won't run into problems: the company seemed genuinely confident that the butterfly keyboard was an entirely positive, breakthrough innovation last time around, too.

But hopefully we've come out with something smarter than had we never tried the first one."Īpple might be sure that the new keyboard is both an improvement and a response to the current one's problems. "And it does take time, and this took time. "There are so many smart people at Apple – so many engineers and designers, that when you turn them loose to go and spend some time and get deep on something, it's just pretty remarkable. "And so that means sometimes taking the time," he says. They took the time to research and say: 'OK, if we want to do something else going forward, why? What should we do, how should we do it? What can we learn that we didn't know before? And how do we end up in a place even better than had we never even tried?' "Rather than just 'OK, never mind, back to the old thing', the team simultaneously worked to make that butterfly mechanism better and better, and to see how far we could keep pushing that. But, as you know, not all the feedback was good.

"From that some really positive things happened: a more stable key surface, thinner designs, and a bunch of really good things. But Schiller is clear that it led to advances, too, and those have been preserved in the new design. The butterfly keyboard that came out of the process four years ago, with the 2015 MacBook, might have gone on to cause Apple a number of issues.